My Airis Effects 51-Filthy High Gain Distortion has landed!

So I first covered this back in February - where this was set to be my first Airis pedal - which indeed has quite evidently happened. I somewhat confused the Diezel Hagen for the Herbert - which is the actual amp that my guitar hero Ian Crichton plays. This would seem to be a slightly milder proposition than that. It delivers a somewhat unusual mix of EVH 5150 and Diezel Hagen

Airis’s Richard Seidlitz mentions that the EQ’s are relatively subtle here - which is evident. This High Gain Distortion is described as ’Nasty’ while it doesn’t necessarily go those places for me. I expected this to be in the upper echelon of gain range, while it’s not that high gin relative to my various heavy hitters.

It has a lovely tonality and sustain - more suitable for Rock / Heavy Rock for me than full on Metal! And it doesn’t deliver that typical Diezel sear as far as I can tell.

Controls - Treble, Mid, Bass, Volume, Gain.

This is a really easy pedal to dial in - in part because of the limited range of those EQ dials in particular.

For my preferred setting I have the Treble @ 2 o’c, Mids @ either 9 o’c or 3 o’c, and Bass @ Max, with Volume and Gain also on Max!

I get a lovely balanced and sustaining high gain tone - but it’s not nearly as high gain as several of my others of this ilk. I’ve always associated Diezel amps with a particular sear and sizzle - while I’m not exactly getting that here. There’s no ’Nasty’ angularity in the output profile either for me. It’s rather a very well balanced / well behaved distortion. I have several High Gain Distortions with more of an edge than this. It’s still a very decent device, but does not exactly match my expectations - which is surely on me.

I really like this 51-Filthy, but it’s not really what I thought it would be - possibly it works better in an fx loop than in front of a pair of Clean Pedal Platform Amps.

The 51-Filthy goes for $209 CAD ($150 USD) on the Airis Effects Webstore.